


Atlanta

by pprfaith



Series: Like the Greeks [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Blood, Exhibitionism, F/M, Female Stiles Stilinski, Genderswap, Gore, Pack Family, Pack Feels, Pack structure, Peter is cryptic and sassy, Scott is okay this time, Sheriff Stilinski Finds Out About Werewolves, Stilinski Family Feels, Underage - Freeform, Vampires, Violence, Warning: I wrote a sex scene, father daughter relationship, pack bonds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 17:56:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1614089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles looks for her place in the grand scheme of things, secrets are told and there's some Buffy vibes going 'round.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atlanta

**Author's Note:**

> re: Exhibitionism tag: It's sex in a dark room containing other, uninvolved parties (i.e. the pack). Basically, it's what happened after every other party when we were teenagers. Still, I didn't know how else to warn for it. 
> 
> Alas, I still have soooo many ideas for this verse, but they're starting to get cracky (time travel, anyone?). So if there's anything in particular you'd like to see, or any inspiration you'd like to share, I'm all ears. And fingers. Cuz I need those to write.
> 
> (Posted earlier than planned, but I had a shit day with work-related stuff today, so I need a happy. Sorry for any typos left.)

+

+

When Stiles was ten, just after her mother died, she had nightmares about a monster living in her walls. 

She woke her Dad screaming almost every night and he got his gun, every single night, and raced to her room and found nothing there but ghosts. 

After a week of interrupted sleep on top of everything else, he sat Stiles down at her desk and explained the gun to her. Speed and velocity and how many bullets it takes, how good his aim is. All of it. He laid it all out for her. 

“It takes me seven seconds to get to your room, one second to aim, less than that to shoot. If anything is really here, if anything ever comes for you, I can kill it dead in eight seconds flat, okay, baby.”

And Stiles looked at him with those big damn eyes, her mother’s eyes, he kept saying, absently, and answered, “I know the monsters aren’t real, Dad. I just…”

She trailed off, shrugged and asked to be put back to bed. 

For the next three months, Dad did a tour of her room every night before bed, gun in hand. At first, it didn’t help at all, but eventually terror gave way to routine because her dad was there and even if he couldn’t fight the monsters for her, he could still look for them. He was there. For her. He wasn’t leaving. 

The monsters, Stiles decided, with the capacity for caustic humour just sneaking up on her ten-year-old self, were scared of her daddy.

After three months, they both slept through the night again.

Until she turned sixteen and suddenly the nightmares were back, fire and blood and death, monsters with red teeth at first and then with gentle, grandfatherly smiles.

“Monsters aren’t real, remember, kid?” her father asked her one morning, over breakfast, eyes tired and intent. 

She smiled at him, wanly and wickedly and didn’t say, “I know.”

+

Dad promised to be home by seven. With take-out.

By eight, when there’s still no sight of Sheriff or take-out and he’s not answering his phone, Stiles calls the station to ask what the hold-up is.

When they tell her he left an hour ago, she fakes his late arrival with her heart in her throat and calls Derek. 

Just to ask him if everything’s okay. Just to, maybe, do a quick sweep. For paranoia’s sake. (Stiles has no idea who’s rubbing off on whom.)

Derek doesn’t answer either. 

Peter does. 

Forty-five minutes later, the entirety of the Hale pack is sitting in the Stilinskis’ living room, looking grim, and Scott, Scott is there, in her dad’s chair, unhappy but _there_. 

(She didn’t even hesitate in calling him, didn’t even consider that he might not come and he did, because even when he’s being a dumb idiot, he’s still the boy she’s loved best for almost a decade and she knows he loves her just as instinctively, as childishly.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he came in and Stiles hugged him and things were almost okay.)

+

“Your dad’s patrol car is out, close by the Hale house. It was definitely dumped there,” Isaac supplies. He’s wrapped around Erica from behind, octopus-ing her. She strokes his arms, nods along. “His scent doesn’t lead away from the car. They took him elsewhere and got rid of the car where it wouldn’t draw attention.”

Peter crosses his arms. “The Camaro is at the supermarket, locked and untouched.”

Lydia, sitting on Jackson’s lap, as far from Peter as she can physically get, asks, “Can you kidnap an alpha werewolf in broad daylight, in public?”

Stiles bites at her thumb, frowns. “You can if you have leverage. Like, say, the alpha werewolf’s girlfriend’s father trussed up in the back of a van?”

“We don’t know it’s the same guys, right?” Scott asks. He shrinks back a bit when they all give him sharp looks, but he doesn’t apologize for speaking up. 

Stiles really has no patience for this song and dance right now. Both her father and her boyfriend are missing. They can be pissed at each other when she doesn’t feel like murdering someone. She glares everyone into submission, earning herself a lot of cowed looks and a snort from Lydia, and then goes back to trying to sort this twenty-car pile-up out.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity fucking fuck. This is like someone cut off her legs and then, for shits and giggles, took her arms, too. 

It’s only a fucking flesh wound. 

Boyd reaches for her, pulls her toward the sofa and stuffs her in-between himself and Peter.

Stiles closes her eyes, smells packhomefamily, and takes a deep breath. “Shit happens way too often in this town, but two separate kinds of shit at the same time with the same MO? Even we don’t have karma this shitty.” She lets her brain run wild, lets it go on any tangent it pleases, knowing that Lydia or Peter will suss out anything useful. 

“Whoever took them knew what Derek was, otherwise he would be here right now. So they know he has a pack and that we’ll come for him. Either they just want him dead, in which case he’d be dead and Peter would be alpha again, which, gods please, no, or they want him alive, which gives us time and also means that steps were taken to keep us away. We probably won’t be able to track by scent. I can try magic and we have computers. Human ways. I have logins to all kinds of shit I shouldn’t even know about.

“We find them, we need weapons. Fire, wolfsbane if necessary, magic. Deaton won’t like it, but he took an oath to protect this pack, so he can damn well fork over ingredients at the very least. And when we find who took them, we kill everything that moves, take them back, go home and sleep it off.”

Scott flinches at that. No-one else does, though, and Stiles looks around to find if anyone’s got anything to add. 

“And if it’s a trap?”

“If it is a trap, we kill everything that moves, take them back, go home and sleep it off,” she repeats, coldly and precisely. 

“Erica, Isaac, you’re our best trackers. They must have been at the supermarket. Scent probably won’t lead anywhere, but we gotta try. Do you mind?” They shake their heads and untangle, both pecking Boyd on the cheek as they go.

Scott, who gets on best with Isaac these days, follows them out the door. 

Boyd stands to grab her laptop from the kitchen. He hands it to Stiles to pull up the relevant sites and log onto her dad’s accounts, before taking it back to the kitchen. Jackson puts Lydia down, goes to join him in researching. 

Peter brushes his hands down his jeans, “I’ll go knock some heads together.”

That leaves Lydia, who pulls Stiles to her feet and says, “Magic. Go.”

+

Peter teaches Stiles about pack. About the laws, the rules, the positions. 

He calls her the alpha’s mate with a smirk and a dirty wink and she socks him in the shoulder. He doesn’t have the grace to look like it hurts. 

“What about roles?” she asks, once he’s stopped snickering at her indignation.

“I know you have a problem paying attention, Little Red, but try to keep up. Alpha, Beta, Omeg-“

“I said roles, not positions.”

And he grins again, like she did a neat trick. 

“Alpha,” he starts over, shushing her when she makes to complain. “Second. Lieutenants. Foot soldiers. Emissary. Weaver. Enforcer. Healer. There are others, but those are the most common.”

Stiles hums, sitting back against a tree at the edge of the clearing containing the burnt down Hale house. Inside, Derek is cussing Isaac and Jackson out for roughhousing around power tools. 

Rebuilding might take a while. 

“Weavers are magic users, too, aren’t they? What the difference to an emissary?”

Peter flicks her nose, too fast for her to react beyond a yowl of pain and scolds, “Wrong question, Little Red.”

+

By midnight, Stiles is so fired up on magic, caffeine and exhaustion that her teeth are chattering and she hasn’t stopped talking in thirty-seven minutes. Lydia has resorted to hair-tugging to direct Stiles where she wants her to go and the last four tracking spells they have cobbled together from books and an appalling lack of basic magical understanding (power Stiles can do, but fire runes do nothing here) have failed and Derek and her dad are still gone and she cannot – 

(Stiles is afraid she is going to kill someone soon and she’s weirdly unsure of who she’d be killing _for_.)

“Got it,” Boyd, perfect Boyd, calm Boyd, reasonable Boyd says, quiet and steady and she’d love him if she didn’t love Derek and weren’t so terrified of Erica’s right hook. 

He stops in front of her, shoulders sight with stress and she thinks of basements and fucking car batteries and something in her ribcage roars. Can you get infected with lycanthropy via pack bonds?

Then Boyd shifts, rolls his shoulders and releases both their tension, bless him. “SUV from the supermarket, parked in this industrial area right now. We can search those few blocks. Won’t have gotten far.”

“Erica,” Stiles commands in her best imitation of alpha wolf. “Kiss that man so I don’t have to.”

+

She lies in bed sometimes, Derek sleeping beside her or alone in her childhood bedroom, and plays with the tight knot of light that’s grown into the cavity of her chest. 

She saw a picture on the internet once, of a tree that grew around a bicycle that’s been chained to it for eighty odd years. The tree just swallowed half the bike, and that’s what she imagines the inside of her chest looks like. 

The pack just grew into it. Around it.

She tugs at the knot, at single strings. The one like lightening that’s Erica, the one like soil and living things that’s Boyd. Isaac tastes like ice at the back of her throat, like the box his father shut him into and the fear he felt and she only ever smoothes along that line of light, stroking, gentle. She imagines she feels him curling into it, sometimes.

Peter is ashes and dust and when she flicks at the tie she has to him, he sometimes flicks back, a bark of laughter and a flicker of fire. 

Jackson feels like sunburn and scales against her skin and she stays away from it because it’s _Jackson_. 

Derek tastes like blood. 

Right next to her or across town, she tugs at the shape of him in her chest and her mouth floods with the taste of blood.

She’s decided that means life, not death.

+

They gather at the edge of the area Boyd narrowed down for them and Stiles takes out a small knife. Peter and Jackson, the sneakiest of the wolves, both let her make shallow cuts in their forearms and draw runes in their own blood. Forehead, cheeks, pulse points.

Scott sniffs in surprise as she applies the last sigils and their scents fade to nothing. “When did you learn to do that?” he asks and she shrugs, doesn’t say _months ago_ , because. Well. 

The two take off to scout ahead and find their wayward alpha and Sheriff while the rest of the pack settle into a defensive semi-circle against their cars, keeping an eye out. 

Half an hour later (Stiles counts every second, makes lists over lists of the things that could be happening to her dad, things that could be going wrong), the former alpha and kanima creep back into their midst, looking grim but not desperate.

Stiles will take it. 

“So?” Erica asks, too impatient to wait. 

Jackson flashes blue eyes at her, but Peter readily starts talking. “It’s vampires. A nest of them. A dozen outside the warehouse, one inside. Derek and the Sheriff are both conscious. The Sheriff’s tied to a wall, unharmed. Derek’s bolted to the middle of the floor.” Peter’s own eyes flash. “They have him in chains and barbed wire and there must be wolfsbane on it, because he is in beta form. Stuck, I think.”

The last bit of hope Stiles had at passing this off as… anything but what it is to her dad, dies. 

“The vampire inside keeps monologue-ing, but neither of them looks really hurt, yet, so that’s good,” Jackson adds, like a boy trying to please his teacher. Stiles smiles blandly.

“What do they want?”

“She keeps talking about a dead nest mate. Someone she thinks Derek and the Sheriff killed together.”

But that makes no sense. 

Derek only killed a few vampires last summer, the ones after Stiles. She rubs at the scar on her forearm, deep and still too white against her fading tan. Derek and Stiles, Derek and the Sheriff and Stiles, who has been ‘the Sheriff’s daughter’ all her life. 

Perhaps she hasn’t taken her Adderall in too long, but her mind skips and dances to a solution she doesn’t like at all.

“They mistook him for me,” she says, and even to her own ears, her voice sounds dead. Because it’s true. They heard some half-assed version of the story, from a fourth vamp hiding in the shadows, from someone mouthing off to the wrong people, a rumour, a tall tale. And somewhere along the way, the alpha and the Sheriff’s daughter turned into the alpha and the Sheriff and, god, will you just _look_ at Stiles, of course that’s the story they believe. 

The one they run with. 

So they kidnap the human they think is part of the pack, use him to lure the alpha and then kill them both, slowly, as revenge and Stiles has been here before. 

She’s sung this song and danced this dance and she’s done with it. Peter burned for his vengeance, Victoria took a knife to her own chest, Matt drowned, Gerard bled black (on her hands and her bat and her soul) and Allison broke everything and this vamp will be ashes and dust before sunrise because she touched what belongs to Stiles and that’s not allowed.

Revenge is a shitty fucking thing to die for, if you ask Stiles, but no-one ever does.

She shifts her stance, squares her shoulders and then lets herself go loose and boneless and _angry_.

“Fuck,” Scott says, heartfelt and low, staring at her with wide eyes. She tries to grin at him, but it probably comes out as a rictus mask of madness. Stiles is aware of her limitations. 

“What?” Isaac asks, looking between them.

“Stiles is mad,” Scott answers, like that’s explanation enough. When Isaac just keeps looking confused, he adds, “You know, break Greenburg’s nose mad, key Harris’ car for picking on me mad? Set Peter on fire mad? That kind of mad.”

(He doesn’t mention Gerard. She loves and hates him for it.)

So Stiles goes cold when she gets really mad. It’s a lot more effective than Derek’s hot and mindless kind of mad and it keeps people alive, so she’s not sorry. Most of the pack’s eyes go wide in understanding and Scott turns back to her, cautioning, “Don’t do anything too insane, okay?”

She shrugs, because Scott doesn’t get to make that kind of demand of her anymore, and shoulders her bat, wolfsbane covered, salted and blessed, and doesn’t say a thing.

Because that’s the thing about Stiles. She gets scared and she gets angry and she gets piss-pants fucking terrified and stupid and reckless, but she’s never sorry.

+

“The vampires outside the warehouse are grouped together, so we can surprise them. There is no perimeter and they aren’t on guard. Sloppy.” Peter grins, all sharp teeth and adds a derisive, “Their kind is far too easily distracted by shiny things.” 

Yeah. Like beating hearts. 

“Isaac, Erica, Boyd and Scott can take them while Stiles goes inside with Jackson and I hang behind with Lydia, providing cover and far range fire.”

He makes a boom motion with both hands, obviously enjoying the way everyone gets a little green at remembering the last time they used Lydia’s Molotov cocktails on someone. 

But then his words register and Stiles rolls her eyes. “How about, you’re with me and Jackson covers Lydia at the back,” she suggests in a way that’s not really a suggestion at all and Peter shoots her a grin, proud and happy.

He’s been teaching her all his dirtiest tricks and this one was the object of the second lesson. If you want people to go along with something they don’t like, give them one obvious detail to fixate on. In correcting the part where Peter stays with Lydia, Stiles implicitly approved the rest of the plan and mollified the pack, who would never willingly go along with anything Peter says.

It’s the kind of complicated, over the top manoeuvring that makes Stiles want to roll her eyes, but Peter teaches and she learns, if only out of self-preservation. 

She checks the other’s faces for more protests, finds nothing, nods. “Let’s go then.”

+

List of Ways Dad Might Find Out:

1\. Someone wolfs out in front of him.

2\. He stumbles into a mess.

3\. He stumbles into a pack mess. 

4\. He gets used against me.

5\. I blurt something stupid. 

6\. Melissa caves.

7\. I get hurt badly enough that Derek bites me.

8\. Peter.

It’s funny how ‘someone tries to kill him for something I did’ never made Stiles’ list. 

It should have. Fucking hindsight.

+

“Pack bonds,” Stiles says, dropping down across from Peter, shoving his book aside so he’ll pay attention to her. “Pack ties. Weavers are magic users with the ability to manipulate pack bonds. To draw on them, strengthen them, even use them to heal.”

She spent two days without sleep _or_ Derek snuggles to find that out and Peter gives her nothing but a mild glare of reproach. 

“Correct answer. Still the wrong question,” he critiques before going back to his book and his pretentious Starbucks coffee concoction.

+

Stiles inhales.

“Are we taking prisoners, Little Red?” Peter asks, smirking around a mouthful of deadly weapons, already knowing the answer.

Stiles shakes her head. 

Exhales.

She charges and the pack follows after, a wave of violence and hunger.

Erica is fire and rage and blood, throwing herself at the first vampire she sees with fans and claws, ripping it to shreds. The dust hasn’t settled, literally, before she hits the next one. 

Boyd, beside her, is calm and collected and just as fucking deadly, pulling dead flesh to ribbons with uncanny accuracy. 

Lydia throws liquid fire and Jackson circles her, ever watchful, eyes so, so blue. 

Isaac is terror on two feet and two hands, and Stiles has always known there’s something broken, something _damaged_ in Isaac, but it’s only when he lets go like this, in the middle of battle, that it becomes glorious instead of sad. He smiles as he kills.

Scott is at his back, reason enough for both of them and Stiles doesn’t even hesitate, doesn’t move toward the fight, stalks straight past it toward the warehouse. She trusts her pack to do their part, to work together and keep her back free, trusts her own ties to them to alert her if anything goes wrong and beyond that, she doesn’t care.

Certainty fills her to the brim.

Alpha comes first. 

And father.

Them first.

Peter orbits her, throwing the lone vampire coming for them back into the fray and then rips open the doors for her like a particularly deadly butler. The metal screeches hellishly under his claws, announcing their presence as loudly as the death screams behind them.

The head vampire is tall and blonde and waxy, bent low over Derek, pulling on his hair, making the barbed wire wrapped around his neck bite deep. There are layers of blood streaked across his chest and his eyes are red and Stiles... 

Stiles steps inside, bat in one hand, mountain ash in the other and all the panic and fear, the worry and the exhaustion, are gone, and forget being a spark, tonight, Stiles Stilinski is fucking _fire_.

The vampire roars, rears back, trapped, suddenly, in a circle too small to even crouch in and Peter looms over her, too many teeth in his mouth, and Stiles can’t look at Derek, bleeding and tortured, because then she’ll set this whole place on fire with her _mind_ , so she looks at her dad instead, who sits on the ground, handcuffed to a random protruding pipe.

He looks like the world has turned upside down. 

There’s a bit of blood at one temple, but he’s tracking her movement and trying to scramble to his knees, saying her name. “Stiles. Stiles, what are you doing here, what the hell is going on, what is…”

She cuts him off with a smile and a hand run over his greying hair (When did you get so old, Daddy?), and says, “Keys.”

His gaze flicks behind her and she nods. “Alright. Can you just, can you hang in there for a moment? I’ll get the keys and then get Derek loose, then you. Alright, Dad?”

The Sheriff’s eyes go wide, hands grappling for her, pointlessly. “No! You can’t! He’s… Stiles, Hale’s some kind… monster. You can’t let him loose!” 

Stiles knows he doesn’t mean it, but snaps anyway, “No. Not a monster. Only a werewolf.”

She turns away before she can regret it. There’ll be enough time for her father’s disappointment in her later. A lifetime, if she’s lucky. 

“Alright,” she chirps, faux happy, turning her back on her dad so she doesn’t have to see him watch what comes next. 

Her voice drops an entire octave. “Keys, bitch.”

The vampire, still trapped, snarls at her, spittle flying, eyes flashing, claws gouging at the invisible barrier keeping her trapped. She might have been pretty once, but she looks… well. Dead. Her blonde hair clashes with her corpse-tan, dark circles under her eyes, sunken cheeks. 

“Why should I?” she taunts, voice grating, even from within her tiny prison, spiteful and proud and fuck, Stiles hates vampires.

Her eyes glow blue and Stiles wonders, again, what the colour means in vampires. Wonders when the sight of rabid monsters stopped scaring her at all.

She doesn’t have time for this shit. So she sets the bat on her shoulder and points at her dad and Derek in turns, like she’s putting them on sale. 

Derek stares at her, red eyes eerie and calm. She expected him to be raging, but he’s holding very, very still. Only his gaze tracks her every motion, hypnotized, except for how she can see every muscle in his body straining.

Straining, but so, so still.

“See them?” she asks the bloodsucker after a dramatic pause. “Tied up. See him?” Peter. “Werewolf. Can’t cross the mountain ash. That leaves little old me to pat your skinny, dead ass down for the keys and I’m all human and breakable.” She takes a step closer to the line than is smart and leans in, whispering low and secret and far too chummy, “And the only way I’m reaching across that line is if every major bone in your body is shattered into enough pieces to keep you from healing while I rifle through your pockets.”

She steps back, arms spread, look, what are you going to do? 

(Broken bones for five hundred, please.)

“So I suggest you give me the fucking keys, because I just had a very long night and all I need is one. Little. Excuse.”

She’ll do it, too. She’ll have nightmares for a few days, but she’ll do it. Has done it, before, with the vamp that took a bite out of her. Just kept hitting until he couldn’t hurt her anymore.

(Melissa taught her how to swing, but not to kill with it. Stiles taught herself that part. Or maybe her wolves did.

Mom. Peter. Gerard. Vampires. Pixies. Omegas. Vampires again. This one is a red list. Red is for important things.)

The vampire stares at her, gauging her sincerity, and Stiles lets her, just stares back, because she’s seventeen and she runs with wolves and has never been good at sane. 

“It was you,” the vampire finally announces, absolute certainty in her voice. “Not the old man. Not ‘Sheriff’.”

Stiles shrugs, doesn’t answer because it doesn’t matter. “Keys.”

“You murdered my André!” Her eyes get brighter, her expression madder and Stiles realizes that not all of that is bloodlust and insanity. Some of it is plain old grief. She wonders which one was André. The one that Derek ripped off of her? The one he ripped to shreds? Or the one that left her with the scar she told her father was a dog attack?

The vampire rages inside her cage, spittle flying, screeching, howling, fighting against the magic, against Stiles’ will so she can avenge her, what? Lover? Brother? Friend?

Stiles watches her for a moment, then cracks her bat against the concrete floor with a hollow sound. “Well, your André should have learned not to attack people who fight back, for fuck’s sake! Keys!”

More spittle. Her hands are raw from battering the magical barrier, but there’s barely any blood. It’s grotesque. 

She screeches, “Never!”

Derek is bleeding enough for Stiles to smell it, copper and salt, even though he is still holding so still, his arms stretched long by chains on either side of him, his neck immobilized by barbed wire locked into rings in front of and behind him, back bowed and neck far, far too exposed. He’s on his knees, and every single atom of him has to scream at him to move, but he doesn’t. His gaze is fixed on Stiles and he doesn’t move. 

Her dad is staring at her, too, but there’s only confusion on his face. Confusion and horror. But Stiles needs those keys because the wolves could break the locks, but it would hurt her father because he’s human, and the mere thought of letting someone – anyone from the pack – at Derek’s neck when he’s on his knees, makes her want to do bad things. If Peter tried, she would kill him. Of that she’s certain, even if she doesn’t know why. 

(She’ll freak out over that particular new turn of events later.)

“Peter,” she orders and he puts on his best polite psychopath look, fangs and all, and steps forward while Stiles swings the bat and look at that, a set of keys comes flying out of the mountain ash circle.

Not so far gone on grief after all.

Stiles changes trajectory at the last second, uses the bat to break the line instead of bone, and Peter lunges. She doesn’t bother watching him finish the bitch off, just grabs the keys and asks, “Neck or arms?”

“Arms,” Derek rumbles, his voice box too shifted, more animal than human. She can barely make out the word. His shoulders are shaking with the force he’s exerting to hold himself still, to hold the wolf inside.

One padlock, two, the chains fall. Behind her, the screaming stops, wetly and abruptly. Peter mutters something that’s probably mildly upsetting. Stiles ignores him, ignores the sounds of a fight dying down outside, the way she can feel her father’s eyes boring into her. 

She reaches inside, feels for her pack.

Boyd took a hit but Erica hovers over him. The others are orbiting. Everyone is safe and hale and whole. Her pack is victorious. 

She feels their glee before she hears it, one of the boys throwing back his head and howling, the others picking it up, triumph and satisfaction and joy, until the walls are shaking with it, window panes vibrating in their frames. 

Half of her wants to stop and join them, to roar out the tension of the past few hours and the feeling of knowing their enemies are dead. 

The other half keeps working, even as her dad makes a questioning noise behind her, almost drowned out by the cacophony of a victorious wolf pack. 

“Don’t worry,” Peter drawls, out of her line of sight, patronizing as hell. “These monsters are on your daughter’s side.”

The barbed wire is trickier than the chains because it’s obviously drenched in something magical, enough to keep Derek shifted, but not enough to keep him from healing. Some of it has grown into his skin. 

In the end, Stiles has no choice but to _rip_ , while he holds still and takes it. The wire comes loose with an earth shattering roar and then Derek kind of collapses into her, digging his face into her stomach, the soft parts, the secret parts. 

The parts he usually doesn’t go near when they have an audience. Stiles drops her bat, settles her hand at the back of his neck and keeps herself between her alpha and Peter as he heals from his wounds.

They stay that way until she feels his features blunt, changing back to human. His eyes, when he stands, are still red. 

Outside, Jackson, cheeky asshole that he is, hollers, “All clear, boss!”

Derek steps away from her, and Stiles finally goes to unlock her dad’s handcuffs and help him up. 

He looks from her to Peter to Derek to the pack hanging in the doorway, and says, “What the hell.”

+

The last thing Stiles said to her dad before he went to work, before he got kidnapped by a crazy vampire clan out for revenge, was, “Don’t let the bad guys get you.”

He smiled at her, half-heartedly, like he usually does these days. Because he knows now that that’s not just Stiles being a LEO’s daughter, but that she actually means it. That she has an actual ideas of the kinds of ‘bad guys’ that might hurt him. 

He gave her a pat on the shoulder and returned the favour with a quick, “Be careful, honey.”

It’s a long shot from his old, “Love ya, kiddo.”

+

Stiles feels herself dropping back down to reality in increments. She stays at dad’s side while Peter calmly wipes his hands clean and picks up her bat, and the rest of the pack – minus Scott, of course – converges on their alpha to make sure he’s okay. 

Derek touches them all briefly, hands to necks and shoulders, and then starts to herd them out. 

“Lydia?” he asks and that’s all he needs to say, because she’s there, being awesome as usual. She waits until both Hales have turned their backs, then pulls out two more flasks and throws them. They land in the exact spots where Derek and Stiles’ dad were tied up, setting any evidence of their presence ablaze. The fires die out quickly, because there is nothing more flammable than concrete and steel here, and she turns to take Jackson’s arm and be led outside like a conquering queen. 

Stiles tugs her dad along. Peter waits by the door to bring up the rear. As they pass him, he leans in, just long enough to whisper, “Not bad, Little Red.”

(He stopped calling her anything but that three months and eleven days ago. She’s counting. There’s another list for everyone who’s figured out the joke in it.)

She snaps her teeth in his direction, the way Erica sometimes does at the boys, and then marches past. Beside her, she can feel her dad’s agitation like a living thing. He tenses when Peter falls into step behind them, covering their retreat. 

Stiles just keeps pulling him along, silently, toward her jeep. 

As soon as they make it to the cars, Lydia and Jackson take off in style after a pair of quick hugs to Derek. Scott waves awkwardly and jogs into the night. 

Derek’s eyes still haven’t gone back to human, and Stiles needs to ask, “Are you alright?”

His gaze flicks to her father, then back. Ah. She shrugs. “I’ll call you later? Earlier. Whatever. I’ll call, alright. You guys get back home.”

She winces as soon as it leaves her mouth, but it’s done now. Home. The pack’s ongoing project. They started tearing the old place down shortly before Christmas and since then, they’ve been slowly rebuilding it, room by room. ‘Home’ currently consists of a living room, a kitchen, a half-installed bathroom and a staircase leading into the sky, but she still thinks of it as that. 

Home. 

Where the pack is.

Where Derek is. 

The only problem is that her father is standing next to her and home should be the house she grew up in. 

Her alpha’s eyes bleed to human. He grabs her by the neck, suddenly, rubbing his thumb into the skin behind her ear and whispers, “I didn’t tell him anything. He was out for most of the night.”

She nods. 

Then she steps back and waves her dad into the car. They’re silent all the way back to the house.

+

“Vampires,” dad says, half an hour later, a tumbler of whisky in front of him and something dark on his face. 

Stiles nods.

“ _Werewolves_.”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“The animal attacks last year…,” she cuts him off right there.

“No. I mean, yes, supernatural, but no, they weren’t… not those werewolves. The pack has never harmed a human that didn’t attack us first.”

“Us? Does that mean you’re…”

“Nope. Like I told that bitch, one hundred percent human here. But that doesn’t mean… humans can be part of packs. And I am. Part of Derek’s pack. And human.”

“And you’re sure Hale didn’t…”

She sighs, staves off a headache. “I think I should probably just start at the beginning.”

He leans back in his kitchen chair, stretches his legs long and gives her a look that she’s seen before. It’s his Sheriff-at-work look and it’s been directed at her far too often in the past eighteen months. 

This is going to be a nightmare. Every single lie she ever told is going to come undone and the truth is so, so much worse in places. He’ll hate her. He’ll… she has no idea what he’ll do. 

Part of her is still relieved that it’s over. 

+

“Which role is mine?” Stiles asks and Peter smiles, wide and toothy. 

“Finally,” he praises.

+

She edits out the truths she can’t stand to tell, neglects to tell her father about the tallies she keeps, times she almost died and times someone else did, broken bones and broken bodies, corpses she’s seen, times she’s passed out from exhaustion because there were lives on the line and they needed answers. 

Secrets she can never tell him. (Gerard. The basement. The taste of Derek on her lips during the long nights she was supposed to stay at Lydia’s. The way her hands never shake.)

He guesses at some of them, anyway, and his lips grow thinner and thinner, the lines around his eyes deeper. 

He drinks (she counts every glass: four and a half) and cusses under his breath and stares alternately at her and the picture of her dead mother on the wall. There is a reason she used to buzz her hair. With it growing out she looks too much like a ghost.

She wishes he’d yell. She wishes he’d interrupt and end her manic rambling. 

He doesn’t.

“You didn’t get jumped by the opposing lacrosse team,” is the first thing he says in an hour.

“No.”

“Jackson. That wasn’t a prank.”

“No.”

“The night at the school.”

“No.”

“Has anything you’ve told me in the past year been true?”

“I was protecting you,” she defends, weakly.

His fingers clench around his glass, expression tightening. “Damn it, kiddo, that’s not your job! I’m the parent here! I protect you, not the other way around.”

A sigh.

He looks old. So terribly, terribly old. He’s going to be fifty in a few years and that’s half a century. Twelve of them with her mom, seven without. She wants to turn back time and make it so the vamp bitch never gets him. She wants to make the bruise on his temple disappear, and his knowledge of all the things moving in the dark. Because if he doesn’t know, he can’t jump between her and danger. 

If he doesn’t know, she can’t kill him on accident. (That’s how she killed her mom. Without meaning to. Her treatments were simply too important for Mom to go to regular check-ups and then the cancer was too far gone already and then - )

She wants to open her mouth, say, “Not anymore, Daddy, not in this world,” but he cuts her off before she can start.

“It stops now.”

“What? The lying? Of course, I swear, I won’t…” And she won’t. She’ll be so good, be the daughter he deserves, she can do that, now, can just tell him everything and it’ll be okay. 

“All of it.” 

No. 

That’s her first instinct, a loud, blaring flare of _no_ , of _over my dead body_ , of _you wouldn’t dare_ , with an intensity that rattles her down to her bones because it’s _vicious_ and ugly and Stiles has felt this way before (angriest girl alive), but never toward her own father. 

But that’s not Dad, sitting across from her, laying down the law, that’s the Sheriff, an open first aid kit and a half-empty bottle of whiskey and a whole lot of shattered trust between them.

Stiles reigns it in, shoves it down deep and doesn’t let it show on her face, doesn’t bare her teeth at an enemy the way she wants to.

“What? Dad…”

He shakes his head pre-emptively, cutting her off at the pass. “How many times have you almost died since this started, Stiles? I’m your father. If you think I’m going to let you run off and risk your life in some sort of supernatural _war_ , you’re-“

“You can’t just forbid me from seeing my friends!” she snarls - because that’s what it is, or as close to a snarl as a human can ever get. Stiles is _livid_.

“I can if the alternative is you dying!”

“I’m not going to die!”

He reaches across the table, fast, but not fast enough. Stiles jerks back, wide-eyed, instinctively. (Hyper vigilance.)

Dad stops, frozen, then drops his hand back into his lap with a pained expression. “Your arm,” he says, too late, placating her like she’s a junkie with a gun, like she's a case. A victim. “That bite. That wasn’t a dog.”

No. It wasn’t. She can’t say it around the sound of her blood pumping in her ears.

“How close did you get to dying?” 

She thinks it’s a rhetorical question, at first, but he stares at her, expectant. 

The vampires in the alley barely make her top ten of almost dying. She doesn’t say it, just retorts, “I didn’t,” through clenched teeth. 

“You could have. And I can’t let you do that. So you’ll stop running around with _werewolves_ , Stiles, or so help me god…”

He doesn’t even sound angry, just tired. That’s the worst thing. Because Stiles did that. Because Stiles wants to _scream_ at him, and that’s not like her at all.

(It feels like that moment when she considered letting Peter at her alpha’s throat and wanted to rip something to shreds at the mere idea of leaving Derek so vulnerable. To anyone. It doesn’t really feel like herself.)

Still…“No.”

“What?”

“No, Dad. I won’t… they’re my friends. My pack. You don’t abandon pack.”

The thought alone makes her stomach turn and her blood boil again.

Even now, she can feel them thrumming in her chest, alive and safe and together, except for the one lurking in the neighbour’s shrubs. Isaac, most likely, because Derek wouldn’t come himself and risk getting shot for defiling the Sheriff’s daughter and Erica and Boyd are inseparable after one of them gets hurt and Jackson’s with Lyds and Peter is just a bad idea all around. 

Isaac it is, sitting out in the dark to guard her, protect her. To make sure she’s safe because pack doesn’t leave pack alone and Stiles would do anything for her father, would murder and lie and steal, anything at all, but not that. 

Trading her legs for her arms is not something she can do. He can’t make her choose. He _can’t_.

(She’s afraid of what she’ll do if he does.)

“Please don’t make me choose, Dad.”

Another sigh. She should have a tally sheet for all the times she’s made her father sigh like he wants to just give up. There’d be a lot of tick marks on that list. “They’ll be fine without you. They’re werewolves, kiddo.”

He rubs a hand over his face. His wedding band gleams in the early dawn light. He might be drunk. Probably not drunk enough. 

Stiles hasn’t slept in almost 24 hours. It’s been longer for him. They shouldn’t be having this conversation. But then, ever since werewolves, all important things in Stiles’ life have happened like this, in the small hours, with all parties bloody and tired and too exhausted to think straight. 

“They need me,” she tells him quietly and it’s not even a fight anymore because no-one is screaming. She lets the urge bleed away, leaving that certainty that stopped scaring her months ago.

He snorts. “What could they need you for?”

That hurts. It hurts because it hits right in the tender spot, right where the scar tissue Scott left has barely scabbed over. Little Stiles, the ADHD kid, the hyperactive one, the smart bitch, the dyke, the loser, the freak. 

_What’s a Stiles?_

Nothing at all. 

“Right. Of course. Because what could anyone possible need me for,” she bites out. 

It’s possible that she’s too bitter for a seventeen-year-old.

“Stiles,” he backpedals, “No. God, kid, you know that’s not what I meant. You’re not…”

“But I am. To you. To everyone else. I’m just a hot mess for everyone to clean up after. But not for _them_. They actually…,” she shakes her head.

They don’t take double shifts until their deputies kick them out of the station just so they don’t have to look at her.

“I matter to them. And they matter to me. And now I’m leaving. Isaac is waiting outside to take me to the others. I’ll,” she swallows. “You need time to come to terms. I’ll… I’ll be back tonight. If I still have a place, that is.”

Because she won’t choose, but he might do it for her. 

He doesn’t even hesitate. “Of course you have a place here. Jesus kid, if I was gonna kick you out, I would have done it over the stolen truck. Or the crashed car. Or a million other things. But not… not this. Just… tonight. Okay?”

“Okay.” She stands, rubs her hands down her thighs, grabs her ever-present bag, filled with a mix of school stuff and magical ingredients. Always prepared, that’s Stiles. And the Boy Scouts. 

“Love you, Dad,” she tells him, and fights the urge to press a kiss to his temple like an errant child. 

“Be careful, honey,” he answers.

When she slips out the front door, he’s pouring another glass (five and a half).

+

Isaac drives. Stiles leans her head against his shoulder and cries.

+

“You were the pack’s Weaver,” she muses, feet dangling from the hood of her jeep. 

The rest of the pack is already running under the moon, but Stiles held Peter back for a moment. 

“It’s how you knew to dream walk with Scott, how you used Lydia. You manipulate bonds.”

Blue eyes gleam at her in the Hollywood-dark of the woods.

“Are you the Weaver now?”

When Stiles tickles along the pack bonds, the taste of ashes is usually not far off. 

He shrugs, moving closer to lean against the car, incidentally facing away from her. “A large part of it is knowledge. I have the skills to take on the role, so it’s almost mine by default.”

“But?”

“But it would take the alpha’s approval to cement the role and that is not very easy to come by, is it?”

She sits, quietly, for long minutes, listening to her pack roam around them, keeping close until they join in the hunt. 

“Trust,” she finally decides. “You need an alpha’s trust to take on a pack role.”

+

Isaac leads her inside, an arm slung over her shoulders, her bag dangling from his free hand. He hasn’t asked how she feels the whole way over. She’s stupidly grateful. 

Derek meets them at the door, wordlessly taking Stiles from his beta. “What happened?” he rumbles into her neck, curling himself around her standing up.

She box-steps them inside, shaking her head against him, not wanting to talk anymore. Issac closes the door behind them, leading the way into the living room. It’s the only room in the house right now, beside the bathroom and rudimentary kitchen, so it doubles as a bedroom. 

Which is pretty much the only excuse they need to puppy pile onto each other all the time. There are three mattresses laid out in the far corner of the room, and the whole pack is there, even Jackson, who must have come here after dropping off his girlfriend. 

Derek sets to stripping Stiles down for bed while Isaac kicks off his shoes and jeans and slips in between Peter and EricaBoyd. Jackson is on their other side, keeping the other betas between himself and Peter. 

“Well?” the oldest wolf asks.

Stiles simply shakes her head again. Isaac says, “He tried to make her choose.”

Everyone in the room stills. Stiles bites back a sudden giggle, slaps a hand over her mouth and almost falls as Derek bends down to tug her pants off her ankles. He’s growling low in his chest and it shouldn’t be soothing because Stiles is not a wolf, but, but, but. 

She gets the space closest to the wall, alpha between her and the pack, pack between her and the door. Lines of protection. 

Derek pulls her into his chest, nuzzling at her temple, her neck, her shoulder. Scenting her, claiming her, reminding her, and she curls tighter into him, wrapping her arms around him. When he raises his face she catches his lips in a kiss and doesn’t let it end. 

She understands his fascination with her stomach now, with how she smells ‘alive’, because she spent the past twelve hours pretty much terrified out of her fucking mind at the idea of losing him, and that was before her dad tried to take him away. His heartbeat under her hands feels like a lifeline, now, like the most necessary thing in the world.

He makes a questioning noise when she starts pawing at him in earnest and she just burrows closer. She’ll be mortified about this later, but right now it’s dark inside, all the blinds drawn against the dawn, and Derek is here and close and alive and he’s not making her choose. 

He’s not telling her that she’s useless or that she needs to give anyone up. He’s not getting drunk so he’ll be able to stand looking at her and she doesn’t remind him of anyone except herself.

Her pack is just beyond his broad back and they’re hers, they belong to her, and she is _never_ giving them up.

Any of this.

She’d die first. 

She might say that bit out loud because Derek stills and she can’t stand it. It reminds her of the warehouse and the chains and barbed wire and his neck still isn’t completely healed. She grinds her hips into his, blanks her mind and bites at his jawline until he loosens and gives in. 

Until he takes her out of her mind.

His hand slips into her panties and Jackson makes a whining noise like he can’t believe this is happening, but no-one says a word and it’s not like they can see, not really. Smell. Hear. But not see. 

She loses her underwear, fumbles with his sleep pants a tad too desperately and almost laughs because where did Stiles, the shy virgin, go? Half a year ago she’d never so much as seen a man naked, and now she’s having sex in a room full of people. 

It’s only one of the many reasons she sometimes doesn’t recognize her reflection in the mirror anymore. 

One leg hitched over Derek’s waist, she shifts, forward and down, gasps and bites at his lip to keep quiet because it’s rough and it bites but she refuses to slow down. Behind them, Erica and Boyd are making their own happy noises and is sounds like Isaac might be involved, much to Jackson’s horror, but Stiles still doesn’t care, suspects she might not, after all, even in the morning. She twists her fingers into Derek’s hair and holds on.

They rock silently together until she sees stars and Derek bites at her neck with blunt teeth, hard enough to bruise.

“It’ll be okay,” he promises into her skin, stubble leaving her raw.

They sleep.

+

Stiles wakes mortified. 

She steals Derek’s shirt and digs around for a full minute to find her panties, ignores Peter’s and Erica’s leers and flees into the kitchen. Boyd is presiding over a pot of coffee and magnanimously hands her a mug. 

She takes it, blushing scarlet. “Sorry about that.”

He shrugs, zen as ever. “It was a hard night.”

After a minute he adds, “Would have heard from the next room, too.”

Strangely, that actually makes it better. 

The rest of the pack trickles in in increments, Derek bringing up the rear. He pulls Stiles up from her chair and plonks her back down on his lap, completely unashamed and glowering at everyone, as ever. Erica giggles, Isaac beams and everything is okay.

Pack. Family. 

After a little while, Stiles passes her mug on to her boyfriend and stands, squirming out of his reach. She perches on the battered table, singed, but steadier and sturdier than most other things left from before the fire, and says, “I’m the pack’s Enforcer.”

Conversation dies around them, but Stiles just looks at her alpha, who stares back steadily, not speaking.

“Last night I wanted to kill at the mere thought of anyone harming you. A few hours ago I almost hurt my own dad for trying to force me away from the pack. I get downright _vicious_ when any of you are threatened and that might be normal wolf behaviour, but I’m _human_.”

No-one says anything, so she just keeps going. “A pack role is cemented by skill and the alpha’s trust. I proved that I have the ability to fill the role when I took care of Gerard. But the other part is new and last night, when we stormed the fort, you didn’t even twitch. You didn’t move a muscle. You just held still and _waited for me to get to you_. And I would have killed anyone who tried to stop me.”

And as far as declarations go, that may be a pretty shitty one, but Derek’s never been good at words and neither has Stiles. She just uses way too many of them. 

“You’re my Enforcer,” he finally agrees, like it’s perfectly acceptable for an alpha werewolf to give that job to a seventeen-year-old girl with a bat and a few runes. 

Okay. 

Okay. 

Peter, the bastard, is cackling again. 

+

Things Stiles is (in no particular order):

1\. Her parents’ daughter

2\. Derek’s girl (Girlfriend is too little, mate too much.)

3\. The pack’s emissary

4\. Enforcer

5\. Scott’s former best friend

6\. Lydia’s and Jackson’s new BFF (How?)

7\. Boyd, Issac and Erica’s safety net

8\. Peter’s playmate

9\. High school student

10\. ADHD baby

11\. Alive

+

There is no doorbell to ring, but they don’t need it anyway. They’re outside, lounging around the overgrown backyard. 

That ratty, sky-blue fleece blanket has made a return. Someone’s washed the blood out and Derek is sprawled on it, flat on his back, Stiles lying with her head on his chest. 

Jackson and Isaac are fighting over something, smacking each other into trees like it’s going out of style. Erica is painting an indulgent Boyd’s fingernails under Peter’s mocking gaze. 

The Sheriff rounds the corner of the house carefully and quietly. Stiles thinks he’s trying to check out the lay of the land. He doesn’t know that they all heard him coming a mile out, but they let him have the illusion.

From her position on top of her boyfriend, Stiles hollers, “If you break any bones, I’m not setting them for you this time!”

“Bitch!” Jackson calls back, followed by Isaac’s cock-sure, “You totally will.”

Then one of them tries to punch a hole in the ground with the other and Peter wades in, pulling them apart like naughty pups. He actually shakes them, much to Erica’s amusement.

“Stiles,” her dad says, “Can we talk?”

She sits up, but doesn’t move her ass from the blanket. The boys casually stroll over, plonking down close by. Erica caps her nail polish. 

Surrounded by pack, Derek against her back and his shirt still on her, Stiles nods. “Yeah. But I’m not choosing.”

He sighs. “I spent the whole day wondering what I did wrong,” her dad confesses, not moving away from the corner of the house. Not coming closer.

“You raised me too loyal,” she offers, because Stiles is a smart girl. She knows her flaws. 

That gets a handful of snorts, including her father. “Yeah. Looks that way. I can’t… kiddo, I can’t approve of you running off, breaking the law and risking your life.”

Derek moves to sit up, but a growly alpha isn’t going to help right now. Not after her dad just spent several hours chained up with a hurting, red-eyed version of him. Stiles loves Derek, but he’s kind of terrifying. She plants a hand on his chest and shoos him back down. He goes. 

The Sheriff shuffles his feet, ducks his head. “But I also know I can’t stop you, because, god knows, you’d just run off and I’d never see you again. I can’t stand the thought of my baby girl running around with monsters. But I can’t stand to lose you, either.”

As far as Stilinski feeling talks go, this one is pretty epic. Stiles smiles softly, and answers, “I love you, too, Dad.”

He nods, smiles, shifts from one foot to the other. “I’ll see you tonight?”

_Are you coming home?_

She nods back. “I’ll be the one wielding the pasta.”

The Sheriff doesn’t acknowledge the pack of werewolves around her in any way as he waves and turns to go. But he doesn’t try to shoot them either, so Stiles can live with it. 

It’ll come, she tells herself as she watches her wolves cock their heads and listen to the patrol car disappearing down the road. 

She knows the second it’s out of earshot, because they all relax.

“Is this why you guys barely go home anymore?” she wants to know, pointing between herself and the spot where her father stood. She should be upset and she is, but not nearly enough. 

“Pack bonds,” Peter offers, placidly. “They tend to eclipse human relationships.”

“Like the ones you have with your parents?” 

That earns her a whole slew of shrugs.

“Shit,” she mutters, dropping back down to bury her face in Derek’s neck. She feels like she should be crying, turns off her brain as well as she can, and concentrates hard on a grocery list for her mom’s famous pasta. 

+

“The monsters aren’t real, honey,” her dad told her when the nightmares started up again, when he hadn’t given up on her yet.

Months later, in a house filled with them, Stiles answers, “Sometimes they are.”

She has a list of the ones that exist, tucked away in her chemistry notebook. 

Later, she’ll show Lydia, and they’ll use the pilfered Argent bestiary to find out everything they can about them.

Later still, they’ll meet them, head on and teeth bared. 

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> [My tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/wordsformurder) is now open for fandom business. Come visit.


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